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Before the Polished Paintings

By

Karen Wilkin

Updated Feb. 4, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

New York

For those of us with a taste for the cranky 16th-century Italian pictures that art historians label "Mannerist," the name of the Florentine painter Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572) means sleek, tense portraits—the young man at the Frick with the slashed sleeves and the impressive codpiece, or the rigid, dark-eyed woman with the amazing pearls and the wildly patterned gown, her blond son beside her, in the Uffizi. Many of us cherish, too, Bronzino's "Allegory of Venus and Cupid," at the National Gallery in London, a kinky free-for-all in which a teenage Cupid gropes his nude mother amid characters symbolizing time, folly, jealousy, and some things I've forgotten. But I doubt that any of us, except specialists, think about Bronzino's drawings.

'The Drawings of Bronzino'

A look at the Met's exhibition dedicated to Agnolo Bronzino, on display through April 18.

'Head of a Smiling Young Woman in Three-Quarter View' Metropolitan Museum of Art

This gap is now dramatically filled by an illuminating show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "The Drawings of Bronzino," on view through April 18. Astonishingly, it's the first exhibition ever dedicated to this fascinating Florentine master, renowned in his day as both artist and poet. The son of a butcher, Bronzino became court painter to Cosimo I de' Medici and his wife, the sloe-eyed Eleonora di Toledo—the woman with the pearls in the Uffizi—entrusted with portraits of the noble family and, among other important commissions, the decoration of Eleonora's private chapel in the Palazzo Vecchio, designs for monumental tapestry cycles, and numerous devotional paintings, including a fresco of the martyrdom of St. Lawrence for the church of San Lorenzo, where the Medici worshiped. (And that's not to mention all those portraits of upper-class types like that fashionably dressed boy at the Frick.)

The Metropolitan's exhibition includes nearly all of the 61 surviving drawings by or attributed to Bronzino, all of them made as studies, explorations of ideas, and/or preparations for finished works in other mediums. Some are carefully developed visions of individual figures who appear in Bronzino's paintings, while others present elaborate compositional schemes, and still others test possibilities or record searches for definitive forms. We come to recognize typical characters—round-faced children, curly-haired young men, heavy-lidded, long-necked women—but there's considerable variation, over time, in Bronzino's handling of the red or black chalk he habitually employed.

In the preparations for a painting of the contest between Apollo and Marsyas, made about 1530-32, Bronzino responds to anatomy with disjunctive touches of tone and bold, expressive contours. About 10 years later, in a study of male crossed legs, he minimally suggests sturdy musculature with broad passages of delicate hatching, disciplined by an incisive, simplified outline. A late preparatory modello, made about 1565, for "The Virtues and Blessings of Matrimony Expelling the Vices and Ills"—a decoration for a Medici wedding—is even simpler; although every inch is filled with athletic nudes, their vigorous physiques are indicated mainly by crisp contours and the smallest possible amount of economically placed shading.

No drawing seems to anticipate fully the enameled surfaces and seamless tonal shifts of Bronzino's paintings. In the surviving studies for portraits, the subjects seem more animated, more vividly characterized, and more nervous than they do in the meticulously finished paintings. Yet as we view the drawings, sometimes troubled by an emphasis on detail that disrupts the whole, sometimes seduced by virtuoso, assured passages, we realize that the probing observation that informs the chalk studies underlies even the suavest, most idealized of Bronzino's paintings—sometimes literally, in the form of incised lines, as recent technical studies of a portrait belonging to the Metropolitan reveal; the draftsman's intense attention to actuality strengthened his paintings.

The exhibition also reminds us of how Renaissance artists were trained. Bronzino was apprenticed early to Jacopo Pontormo, who was only nine years older. (Their close friendship endured for over four decades.) As required, the young Bronzino learned to emulate his master's soft, smoky drawing style, so successfully that the attributions of some included works have shifted between the two artists, while others have been identified as collaborations from Bronzino's time with Pontormo. By the mid-1530s, Bronzino was on his own, working for the Medici. His drawings are now more individual: a distinctive combination of an awareness of Leonardo-esque delicate shading and a love of Michelangelo's vigorous articulation of bodies in space. Bronzino's horror vacui style is largely his own—those tightly packed expanses, especially in his later works, filled with twisting, angled Michelangelo-inspired figures, limbs opposed to limbs, bodies to bodies.

Toward the end of his career, Bronzino still received important commissions, but fewer of them, since the death of Eleanora deprived him of his strongest supporter; Cosimo I preferred Giorgio Vasari's crabbed style. And, as the exhibition makes clear, some of those jam-packed late works are distinctly problematic. The drawings for even the most airless of Bronzino's late works are, nonetheless, brilliant. The entire exhibition changes our perceptions of his paintings. I'll never look at that beautiful boy at the Frick the same way again.